Education: A. A. U. P.

Last week three professors employed respectively by California, Washington and Stanford Universities informed the people of Oregon that their Chancellor of Higher Education, William Jasper Kerr, was totally incapable of educational leadership, that his election was a “stupendous blunder” in the first place, that their State University would never have a “healthy and normal life” until they got rid of him. This blast, a monstrous piece of impertinence on its face, was delivered by the three professors as representatives of that extraordinary organization, the American Association of University Professors.

A. A. U. P. speaks with the authority of 12,000 members in 450 U. S. colleges & universities. Dues range from $1 per year for emeritus members to $4 for active members. Any teacher or researcher in an accredited institution may join. Founded in 1915 to “increase the usefulness and advance the standards and ideals of the profession,” the Association has ever since been strenuously denying that it is a “professors’ union,” that its prime purpose is to champion victims of academic injustice. Its committees range from A to Z, busy themselves with such subjects as “Cooperation with Latin-American Universities,” “Pensions and Insurance,” “University Ethics,” “Depression and Recovery in Higher Education.” But its Committee on Academic Freedom & Tenure, significantly designated Committee A, almost alone makes News. Committee A does not pull its punches. Its reports are models of courageous investigation and forthright speaking. If the entire profession should ever nerve itself to act as vigorously as this militant minority speaks, it would dispel forever the lay conviction that professors as a class are learned mice.

Comprising a cloistered collection of crotchety individualists who mortally dread insecurity, the normal U. S. campus resembles an inactive volcano. Beneath its outward calm there rumble, seethe and surge perpetual gratings of opinion, ripples of backbiting and intrigue, tides of hate and fear. With fortunate exceptions the instructor fears and resents the department head, who fears and resents the dean, who fears and resents the president, who fears and resents the trustees. Most pedagogs work off their passions in private talk, present smiling exteriors to superiors. But occasionally one stiffens his spine, talks back or speaks out in defiance of tradition, ruling beliefs, sacred cows. Then the volcano is apt to erupt, spew him out. Ready for just such an emergency stands A. A. U. P. with its Committee A.

The Association acts only on specific complaint, usually one of dismissal without just cause or notice. Last winter it deplored the farce which Huey Long had made of academic freedom in his Louisiana State University, but held its fire because no facultyman had yet dared raise his voice in protest. When a complaint seems worthy of action, Committee A asks A. A. U. P. chapters in neighboring universities to nominate an investigating committee. The committee visits the complainant’s campus, hears both sides firsthand. Sometimes it finds that a sluggard or incompetent has got his just deserts. Sometimes it is able to “work a reconciliation. Only in flagrant cases of injustice does it consign the offending university to public infamy in a stinging report.

Last year Committee A received 56 complaints. Twenty-eight were rejected or required no investigation. Only nine were deemed worthy of an inquisitorial visit. Among recent causes célèbres have been those of Professor Ralph E. Turner v. Chancellor Bowman at University of Pittsburgh (TIME, March 4), Professor John A. Rice v. President Holt at Rollins College (TIME, Dec. 4, 1933).

Less publicized than the Association’s investigations are their results. Officials will say only that some investigations have been followed by reinstatements, some by payments to injured parties. Since 1931 A. A. U. P. has packed extra power behind its punches by blacklisting unrepentant offenders. First to go on the list were four of Mississippi’s institutions of higher learning, after Governor Theodore (“The Man”) Bilbo’s spectacular purge of 179 presidents, deans, professors. When Bilbo’s successor reinstated the purged pedagogs, Mississippi was returned to favor. Currently in academic Coventry are Harris Teachers College (St. Louis). Rollins College, Brenau College (Gainesville, Ga.), De Pauw University and the U. S. Naval Academy. No loyal Association member will take a job at any of these institutions.

Kudos

“We were perfectly frank and discovered . . . that the whole situation was a mess. . . . We came to the final conclusion that we really needed fewer and better degrees. There are too many degrees and there are too many people receiving them, and the honorary degree situation throughout the country is not an edifying one.”—The chairman of the committee on Honorary Degrees at a Conference of Trustees of Colleges and Universities at Lafayette College last April.

President Thornwell Jacobs has striven earnestly and unceasingly to put Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University on the map ever since he revived it in 1915 from the ashes of an older college destroyed by the Civil War (TIME, August 6). Last week he got its name and his picture in many a U. S. newspaper by scoring a novel, pre-season beat in the annual kudos competition. When Atlantans met to dedicate a $100,000 gift of 400 acres and lake from Oglethorpe’s prime benefactor, William Randolph Hearst, President Jacobs crowed that Oglethorpe was about to become the first men’s college ever to devote its commencement exclusively to women. Next night, before an actual audience of 7,500 and a potential one of several millions represented by a battery of press cameras and a Hearst Metrotone newsreel outfit, twelve distinguished women marched out to kneel before President, deans, trustees (an old Oglethorpe custom) and receive their hoods & degrees. They were: Vice President Helen Rogers Reid of the New York Herald Tribune (LL.D.), Representative-at-Large Caroline Goodwin O’Day of New York (LL.D.), Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Josephine Aspinwall Roche (Doctor of Commercial Science), Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon of Harvard (Sc.D.), Dean Clara Mildred Thompson of Vassar (LL.D.), Anatomist Florence Rena Sabin (Sc.D.) and Mrs. George Gould, Mrs. Sidney Lanier Jr., State Archivist Ruth Blair of Georgia, Founder Martha McChesney Berry of Georgia’s Berry Schools and Aviatrix Amelia Earhart, all of whom received red, white & blue hoods with the Jacobs-invented degree of Doctor of Public Service. To receive a Doctorate of Letters, Pulitzer Prizewoman Caroline Miller (Lamb in His Bosom) knelt before William Randolph Hearst Jr., acting as proxy for his trustee father.

At Liberty, Mo. last week William Jewell College (enrolment: 321) welcomed back a famed former student. He left it a quarter-century ago after an inconspicuous campus career in which he had earned his way by organ-playing, had been too poor to pay a $50 fraternity initiation fee. He returned in triumph. The local chapter of Phi Gamma Delta belatedly initiated him into the brotherhood of the late Calvin Coolidge. He delivered the commencement address. Finally, William Jewell bestowed on him its degree of Doctor of Laws. Everyone knew, that his real name was Marion Sayle Taylor, but throughout these ceremonies he was consistently referred to by the name under which his sexy heart-to-hearts have won him vast radio fame: THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE.

Last week Colorado State School of Mines and Drake University respectively made Citizen Herbert Hoover a Doctor of Engineering and Doctor of Laws. Other kudos, given up to this week:

College of Charleston (Charleston, S. C.)

Bernard Marines Baruch …………………………………………….LL.D.

Ambassador Robert Worth Bingham. …………………………..LL.D.

President-Elect Isaiah Bowman of

Johns Hopkins University …………………………………………..LL.D.

President John Stewart Bryan of the

College of William and Mary ………………………………………..LL.D.

U. S. Senator James Francis Byrnes of

South Carolina …………………………………………………………….LL.D.

President James Bryant Conant of

Harvard University ………………………………………………………LL.D.

President Charles Pelot Summerall of

The Citadel…………………………………………………………………. LL.D.

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Willis

Van Devanter ………………………………………………………………LL.D.

Columbia University (New York, N. Y.)

President Tyler Dennett of Williams

College ………………………………………………………………………Litt.D.

Economist Edwin Walter Kemmerer of

Princeton …………………………………………………………………….LL.D.

Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace ……………..LL.D.

Fordham University (The Bronx. N. Y.)

Governor-General Frank Murphy of

the Philippines…………………………………………………………… LL.D.

MacMurray College (Jacksonville, Ill.)

Mrs. Harold LeClair Ickes……………………………………………. LL.D.

New Jersey State College for Women

(New Brunswick, N. J.)

Mrs. Dwight Whitney Morrow……………………………………….LL.D.

Pennsylvania Military College (Chester, Pa.)

Secretary of State Cordell Hull …………………………………….LL.D.

Russell Sage College (Troy, N. Y.)

Anne Morgan………………………………………………………………L.H.D.

University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa,

Ala.)

Secretary of the Interior Harold LeClair Ickes………………LL.D.

University of California (Berkeley. Calif.)

Sir Josiah Stamp …………………………………………………………LL.D.

Nobel Prizeman George Hoyt Whipple

(pernicious anemia)…………………………………………………… LL.D.

University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati,

Ohio)

President Harold Willis Dodds of

Princeton……………………………………………………………………..Sc.D.

James Milliken University (Decatur, Ill)

Sig (campus pet) ………………………….. Bachelorof Canineology